


you'll never know, dear

by lutzaussi



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Flowers, Friends to Lovers, Language of Flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 17:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9669431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: Sakura has flowers on her hands and they mean longing and waiting and love, but she doesn't know who she is longing for, who she is waiting for, who she is supposed to love.





	

It wasn’t taboo or anything to talk about soul markings in Konohagakure, but it was enough of a tradition to conceal them that when Sakura turned ten and they appeared, she took to wearing a pair of gloves secured around her wrists whenever she went out. A good pair, made for ninjas so they didn’t make her too warm in the sun, and they dried quickly when wet.

It was a disappointment to see Sasuke not wearing gloves, to see his hands unblemished, but on the plus Naruto was also not wearing gloves after he turned ten.

All told, though, the hands were one of the worst places for one to have their soul marks. Given that roughly 70 percent of the population of not just Konohagakure, but the entire world wore gloves every day, unless Sakura decided to go without, nobody would ever see that her soul marks. Her soul marks, that were twisted roses, surrounded by daffodils and camellias, perfect matches spreading over her palms and the backs of her hands.

-

There were matchmakers, of course, people who could see the bodies that were paired, but Sakura didn’t hold much faith in that. She believed in falling in love organically, then finding your soul mate. She believed in working for it, not expecting it delivered on a platter.

But—as she turned thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and Naruto had found Kiba and Hinata had found Lee, she almost wished she had the courage to go to a matchmaker.

-

Tsunade didn’t ask about the gloves, which was a relief because the woman was anal about anything and everything. Cleaning, medical vocabulary, methods of healing—all of it Sakura learned. It was more of a crash course than real teaching, like the kind that Ino got from Shizune, but Sakura was nothing if not highly intelligent, and she soaked up all the new information like she was a sponge and it water.

Once she hit the age of seventeen she was, for all intents and purposes, the best medic-nin in the world apart from her teacher. And even then, in some areas she excelled far more than the older woman, in poisons and nerve work and mental health.

She hated surgery though, even though she loved being able to heal and help others, because those who needed surgery were in pain, surgery was a further pain, and recovery was usually more pain.

It was a Sunday morning—three or four, she didn’t know—when she was washing her hands after one such surgery and her teacher walked in to her bare hands and her flowers vined along her wrists.

-

Naruto, being the closest thing she had to a brother, had earned the right to see her soul markings. After Tsunade had seen them something in Sakura had shifted and she found that she didn’t care as much, though she still did care.

“These ones?” he asked, running a finger along the camellias that bordered her knuckles. Sakura shifted so her head was no longer tucked on his shoulder, caught her own knuckles and said, “Camellias. Ino told me they mean longing and waiting and—“ she bit off that thought.

“And what?” Naruto prompted, laying back down on Sakura’s bed, careful of the takeout boxes they had emptied an hour before.

“—and love,” Sakura said, feeling a little mortified.

-

She didn’t know what Ino’s soul marks were but she was fairly sure—a surety backed up by statistics—that the other girl’s marks were not on her hands. After all, Yamanaka Ino had a goddamn uniform and she always had at least fifty percent of her body not showing at any time.

Crop tops and short skirts were, Sakura was finding, slightly distracting. The gloves and high boots really didn’t help, either.

-

Naruto had daisies on his back, and he didn’t ask Sakura but she touched them with light fingers and told him that they mean ‘faith,’ and he was a little more thoughtful after that. Hinata had pansies on her ankles and Sakura hummed ‘thoughtful,’ and ‘caring’ to her one afternoon while they painted their nails and gossiped.

-

Kakashi had zinnias on his neck. Loyalty. Tsunades had the whispers of sunflowers on her forearms, and spider lilies hiding under the cuffs of her sleeves. Respect, radiance, loss. Kurenai had lavender across her shoulders. Faithful. Choji had honeysuckle and cherry blossoms climbing up his chest, generosity and kindness.

Sakura began to collect others’ marks and meanings, because the marks only told something about the soul. Each pair of hands she saw bare was a sigh of relief and a simultaneous tensing of her shoulders. She saw many of them, because at the hospital everything was bared. Everything except her hands.

-

When she was hedging on eighteen she came home from the hospital half-committed to visiting a matchmaker the next day, if only to stave off the young men who thought she would be their soulmate if only because it was her job to take care of them. Ino had broken in, though, and was digging through her closet to find some article of clothing.

“If you kept your wardrobe in your own apartment you wouldn’t have this problem,” was what Sakura said when she found her, still wearing her own soft-soled shoes and hospital smock.

“You know,” Ino returned, pulling out a pair of pants with a noise of triumph, “that does sound like a solution.”

-

She came home a week later to find Ino moved in. There was not much she could do at that point, so she didn’t. She just shrugged and worked up a schedule for dinner.

It started to feel natural by the third day, like they were the only dancers in a delicate ballet that involved the bathroom, the closets, and the plants that Ino brought. Despite having her own room and by extension her own closet, Ino still kept roughly half of her clothes in Sakura’s.

Sakura really didn’t have the heart to make her take them out, though.

-

Sakura still took missions, however few and far between they were, and she was halfway back from Amegakure with Naruto passed out on her back when she found herself crying. She collected herself well enough to deliver a report and the target scroll to Tsunade, but by the time she got to her room and her bed she was in tears again.

It wasn’t anything, or perhaps it was a collection of things. Statistically she knew that nin had far shorter lifespans than civilians—people like Hiruzen and Tsunade were outliers, one-in-a-generation legends who were powerful enough that most of the world wasn’t a threat until natural death came creeping up. And to not find your soulmate even when you were pushing twenty was almost unheard of.

But Sakura—

Sakura wasn’t like that, or at least she thought she couldn’t be like that, and that was the only thing ringing in her head as she didn’t bother to clean off or change her clothes, but climbed into bed, sandals still on.

-

Ino found her in the morning because Ino needed clothes that were in Sakura’s closet. And Sakura was, well, enough of a disaster that Ino refused to leave her, and that was how Sakura ended up being bodily stripped of her muddy sheets and muddy and bloody clothes and tossed in the tub.

She had a fairly thick layer of mud around her neck, on her hands from losing her gloves, and around her ankles where her shorts and boots didn’t meet. The bath was warm, and she was quite content to let it work its magic without interference.

But Ino was not content to let sleeping dogs lie—or in this case, sleeping girls lie. She stripped off her own gloves and got up to her elbows in shampoo and pink hair while she glared Sakura into washing off her legs, at least. After she had rinsed and combed out Sakura’s hair, she didn’t let the other girl try to escape, but grabbed her hands and scrubbed them so thoroughly they were red under the black lines.

And Sakura found, instead of two mirror images of her camellias and roses and daffodils, there were four.

-

“I knew, you know,” Ino said, the next day after Sakura had unlocked and untrapped her bedroom door and accepted a cup of tea and a bowl of rice porridge.

Sakura’s breath caught in her throat, and she felt a mix of furious and stupid and ashamed. “Why didn’t you fucking _tell_ me?” she croaked out, hoping that whatever illness Amegakure had cursed her with would go away so she could yell properly.

“I,” Ino looked like she was grasping for straws until she deflated, sifted a hand through the mess her hair was in, “don’t know. I was—I was fucking scared.”

And Sakura wanted to say something like ‘and what if I hadn’t come back from Amegakure?’ but she didn’t. She didn’t.

-

They were not on the best of terms for a while.

Sakura would admit that the flowers and love notes were, if nothing else, an effort on Ino’s part. She didn’t try very hard anyway, because she was sick and hurting and Naruto was touch and go because whatever had affected him had affected the Kyuubi, his regular form of healing.

But Tsunade had ordered her off of work at the hospital for a week and a half and active missions for a month longer, which left her kicking around in her room in a sour mood until Kiba broke in looking absolutely desperate.

“They won’t let me see him,” was the first thing out of his mouth before he took in Sakura’s red nose and puffy face and the tissues littering her bedside, and folded her into the most sympathetic of hugs.

She sent him back after an hour of talking shit with instructions to tell Shizune that if he didn’t get access to his eternally-bonded-destiny-soulmate, Sakura would hunt her down and cough on her and make it stick.

(she sent him with some healing jutsu, so _he_ wouldn’t get sick)

-

The second day after she was back at work—only half-days, though, Tsunade insisted—Ino had dinner ready and a little vase of daffodils and cherry blossoms on the table by the time she shuffled back into the apartment.

“I would like,” Ino said, “to start this over.”

-

Sakura woke up to find love letters stuffed under her pillow for a full week but they weren’t new love letters—they were all dated from four years before, and they were heartbreaking.

-

She forgave Ino, she forgave Ino, she forgave Ino.

-

They fit together better after that, back to their ballet but whirling closer and tighter around each other, more careful and more caring. And, really, it made it a lot easier when they got a smaller place, one with a lone bedroom and one closet. One less thing to worry about.


End file.
